Improvisation: B. Constraints and Dimensions

We’ve discussed how limiting it can be to rely on strict rules, patterns, or memorised “vocabulary”, if our goal is free, creative, personal improvisation—but also how overwhelming it can be when “anything goes”!

Expansive creativity: constraints and dimensions

The core principle behind the “Constraints and Dimensions” technique is that there can be freedom through constraints. With the right approach, we can both eliminate overwhelm and allow real creative freedom.

I must give credit for this way of thinking about Improvisation to our long-standing Resident Pro for bass guitar, Steve Lawson. Steve is perhaps the most admired solo bassist in the world today, and his approach is highly improvisational. I was fortunate to take one-to-one bass lessons with Steve a number of years ago and it happened to be around the time we were designing the Expansive Creativity framework for our earliest training on Improvisation at Musical U.

He shared a perspective of thinking in terms of the dimensions available to us when making musical choices. It’s not just “which note should I play next?” but a whole set of choices we are making moment-to-moment when improvising—of which the note pitch is just one. There are also things like volume, playing technique, the timing, and so on. To my mathematically-inclined brain, this made sense immediately! And it immediately reveals that whichever dimension we are focused on, we are (either intentionally, or implicitly) making decisions about the others i.e. we are constraining them in some way.

This developed into the idea of Constraints and Dimensions: a clear way of thinking about the fact that by adding certain intentional constraints to our music-making, we free ourselves up to choose more easily in other dimensions. Over time, as we codified our 4-Dimensional Active Listening framework (see Chapter 5: Active Listening) this became even clearer, with the four Dimensions of Timbre, Dynamics, Pitch and Rhythm.

Dimensions Recap We cover the four Dimensions in detail in Chapter 5: Active Listening and Chapter 17: Expression but here’s a brief overview if you haven’t read those chapters yet or want to refresh your memory:

A “note” simply means “a sound used to make music”. A note has four dimensions:

Pitch
Rhythm
Timbre
Dynamics

Pitch is the perceived highness or lowness of a sound. “Where on the whole continuum of high sounds to low sounds does this particular pitch in the music fall?”. Not all notes have a single well-defined pitch, but almost all musical sounds can be described in terms of where they exist on this dimension of pitch.

Musical notes also exist for a certain length of time. The musical term Rhythm describes the pattern of the longness and shortness of notes and the silences in between.

Sounds carry varying degrees of energy. When it’s a small amount of energy, the sound is what we call a “soft” or “quiet” sound. Sounds with a large amount of energy are called “loud”. We refer to this as softness, loudness, or “volume”. Changes in volume over time in music are called Dynamics.

Timbre is a word borrowed from the French and pronounced like the first part of the word “tambourine”. An English term with similar meaning is “tone colour”. It refers to the properties of a sound that can make one note sound different than another, even if they’re playing the same pitch.

For example if you listen to a flute playing middle C and you listen to a piano playing that same pitch, at the same volume and for the same duration, you can still immediately tell the difference between the piano and the flute by their timbres.

Here’s a simple example to illustrate. If we come back to that earlier scenario of a pianist sitting at the keyboard feeling overwhelmed by being free to play several notes using 88 keys at any given moment, we can reduce that overwhelm by applying certain Constraints. For example, we might decide on a particular rhythmic pattern to play repeatedly, in a certain range for each hand on the keyboard, and perhaps even a particular key and scale. There is still a huge range of creative choices available in Pitch, as well as Dynamics and the subtleties of Rhythm and Timbre—but suddenly the musician feels far less overwhelmed.

The point is that we constrain some Dimensions in some ways, to let you more easily and expansively explore what’s still possible.

This idea alone is often a game-changer for musicians! You can apply as many or as few Constraints as you like, and they can be as broad or specific as is helpful. In the exercises below you’ll have the chance to experiment with a wide range of Constraints and explore the varying freedom across Dimensions they produce.

Just like with Active Listening, we can also think bigger-picture in terms of Form i.e. what changes and stays the same over time. One of the easiest ways to start adding clear musical structure to your improvisations is simply to apply certain Constraints for a time, and then change the Constraints to begin a new section.

With this view on things, it’s easy to see that the traditional approaches we’ve been contrasting Expansive Creativity with are limiting because they essentially apply Constraints which are too strict and too set-in-stone, which naturally produces same-y sounding improvisations and the musician feeling more robotic than creative. You can also see why we say those approaches aren’t bad or to be avoided, necessarily—they’re just too small a subset of what’s really possible and helpful.

Let’s start exploring what improvising using Constraints and Dimensions is like. There are several exercises below. You might like to go through them in turn, and then come back to those you enjoy most. Each of the exercises has the same format: set a particular Constraint (or multiple) and then try improvising accordingly, exploring the creative choices still available to you.

In all cases, use the Play-Listen/Listen-Play technique to learn from your own creations and continue to refine your creative instinct. And if you find yourself noticing something you like, you have full permission (and encouragement!) to explore it further and have fun experimenting creatively. Remember that the whole Expansive Creativity framework is designed to set you free creatively, so we are never setting strict “rules”. Even our Constraints should be considered guidelines or guard-rails. They can and should be ignored any time your creative instinct knows better!

EXERCISE: One-Note Improv

Constraint: Use just a single note pitch.

Choose a note on your instrument. For example, Middle C. You can also use your singing voice if you prefer. This is the only note pitch you’ll use—but all other Dimensions are completely free.
Play a short musical phrase, using just that note. Listen as you play.
Now do it again, and create something different. You can just play and see what comes out, or think more intentionally about exploring Rhythm, Dynamics and Timbre.
See how different-sounding you can make your improvisation each time. Any of the detailed coverage of the four Dimensions in Chapter 5: Active Listening or Chapter 17: Expression can help inspire your explorations.

We’ve seen that musicians often find it a bit mind-blowing to discover how much musical freedom is possible with the One-Note Improv! If you’ve started from a place of thinking that improvising means “picking which notes to play”, it can be exciting to discover how much is possible even with just a single note pitch.

When you’re ready you can expand this exercise into…

EXERCISE: Two- and Three-Note Improv

Constraint: Use just two (and then three) note pitches.

Repeat the One-Note Improv exercise, but this time choose two notes to work with. This could be, for example, the first two notes of a major scale, but it could also be two random notes, two notes far apart in pitch, or two notes of a chord. Notice how even choosing your Constraints can involve considerable creative choice and express your taste!
When you’re ready, choose a different pair of notes to use, or expand to using three different note pitches.

What was your experience? Did you get bored with such tight Constraints on Pitch? If so, imagine what else you can do with Rhythm, Dynamics and Timbre. Look for more ways to creatively exercise your choices. It can be tempting to just flip back and forth between the notes, but what happens if you hold one of them back for a time, making use of all the one-note improv skills you’ve developed, and then bring in a new note, presenting it like a jewel?

The big opportunity here is to notice how liberating it can feel to introduce a second note pitch after some time spent on One-Note Improv. And then introducing a third note can feel very exciting indeed! We can start to notice how much musicality is glossed over when improv is approached from a starting point of a whole scale, or focused on playing “as many notes as possible, as fast as possible”. We also begin to appreciate the huge musical significance of each note pitch we choose to include in our improvising.

If you’re studying Solfa or Intervals, this is a great opportunity to get more deeply familiar with those building blocks through the Play-Listen/Listen-Play loop and the musical impact of the choices you make. For example, practicing Two-Note Improv with the do re toneset feels very different than with do mi or la, do—and improvising melodies using the two notes of a Major Third has a very different character to using a Minor Third or a Perfect Fourth.

If you’re focused on the Pentatonic Scale (as recommended in Chapter 9: Solfa) or the Pentascale (as recommended in Chapter 10: Intervals), using those scales as a Constraint on Pitch is a perfect way to dovetail your Improvisation practice with your Ear Training.

Andy Says… I like to think of the pentatonic as the “scale that keeps on giving”! I’m regularly discovering new and exciting ways to use it, whether that’s within a composition, a production, or in improvisation (free or jazz). The major and minor pentatonic scales are very user-friendly, due to there being no Half Step movement, and therefore no (troublesome) Tri-Tone interval. So it creates a very consonant sound against its relative harmony. Who hasn’t noodled away with a C Major pentatonic over a C chord for many minutes (or hours!) at a time? :) While this is great fun to experience and experiment with, we can start to miss the tensions created by pitches outside of that pentatonic scale… Fortunately, one simple means of adding more tension is to simply play a pentatonic scale rooted on the 5th of our chord. So if our backing is a C Major chord we can play a G Major pentatonic against it, which introduces a little tension in the form of the note B against the C chord. Swapping between the two scales (rooted on the tonic vs. rooted on the fifth) can deliver enough tension and resolution to create a more interesting sound that feels a little more above the harmony. If you’re feeling adventurous, try playing a pentatonic from the second scale degree e.g. a D Major pentatonic over a C chord. That will give you a rather jazzy sounding major 7th, 9th and #11th! e.g. Over a C Chord: C Major pentatonic: C D E G A G Major pentatonic: G A B D E D Major pentatonic: D E F# A B Give it a try!

Next, let’s try applying a very different kind of Constraint. We’ve said that we can constrain any of our four Dimensions—but that’s not the only kind of Constraint that can be useful…

EXERCISE: 10-Second Improv

Constraint: Improvise a melody for ten seconds.

Set a timer for ten seconds.
Start the timer and begin improvising. When the timer stops, stop.

You may find it easier to include additional Constraints to prevent overwhelm. For example, you can use the One-, Two- or Three-Note Constraints here too. The purpose of the exercise however is to notice the effect it has to constrain your creation to a fixed time period.

How does it affect the musical choices you make? Do you have to think differently about Rhythm? What about Pitch?

Your musical taste will naturally make you want to bring your improvised melody to some kind of satisfying completion by the time the alarm goes off. What can you discover through experimentation about how to make that happen?

This exercise is a great illustration of constraints that go beyond the four Dimensions. Can you think of others that would be interesting to try?

EXERCISE: Melody-Inspired Improv

Constraint: Use either the Pitch or Rhythm of a given melody to create your own.

Select a short melody you’re familiar with. You can use something from your own repertoire, or the example Starter Songs in Chapter 9: Solfa. You can even use a technical exercise like a scale.
Use the note pitches from that source melody, but make up your own rhythm. Try this a few times.
When you’re ready, switch to using the rhythm from that source melody but choosing the note pitches yourself. You can make this easier at first by constraining yourself to a few pitches like in the One/Two/Three-Note Improv exercises above, or you can use the same pitches featured in the source melody (but deciding for yourself which to play when).

Something valuable which will emerge as you practice this exercise is the power of “same vs. different” in music, and the impact it can have to keep some things the same while varying others. Let’s explore that further…

Musicians often wonder how to make their improvisations or compositions more interesting or effective, musically. A core part of what makes music interesting or effective is how it plays with the listener’s expectations, by creating some form of tension and then releasing it. There are many ways to do this, but one simple way is to do something repetitive until the listener is almost itching for a change… and then play something different.

EXERCISE: Tension and Release

Constraint: Do the same thing for a while… Then switch it up.

Using any form of improvisation you’re comfortable with (for example, any of the exercises above), play the same thing three times. Then make a change.

For example you might play the exact same phrase three times… and then play a slight variation in Pitch or Rhythm on the fourth time. You might play a series of long, quiet phrases… and then a short, loud one. You might play a series of phrases using just a single note pitch… and then finally introduce a second.

Really pay attention (i.e. Listen, don’t just Play) to how the repetition creates a form of tension for the listener which is then released, by setting their expectations about what’s likely to come next… and then defying them.

Let’s try one more exercise with another Constraint on Form. One very common structure in musical Form is some kind of “call and response”: a musical phrase is played, and then the following phrase (which might be played by the same musician or another musician) seems to “answer” it.

EXERCISE: Call And Response Improv

Constraint: Play a response which “answers” the musical “question” of a given phrase.

Listen to a musical phrase. You can play or sing something yourself (improvised or from existing music) or you can play just one phrase from a recording. This will be our “call”.
Play your own musical phrase which aims to respond or reply to what you heard: the “response”.
Do this multiple times for the same call. Then choose a different phrase to be your call, and repeat.

As you get started with this, you might find it helpful to use the idea from the Melody-Inspired Improv exercise above, i.e. mimic either the rhythm of the “call” phrase or its pitches, while making the other Dimension your own. If you’ve read Chapter 8: Relative Pitch or you’re otherwise familiar with the idea of a tonic note, you might also like to make use of the fact that ending a phrase on that tonic note tends to feel like “coming home”.

These exercises are all great ways to start practicing improvising, but more than that, they provide an introduction to thinking in terms of Constraints and Dimensions. You will start to notice the implicit or assumed Constraints in use across all the music you listen to and play. You’ll also gain an increased awareness of the possibilities across all Dimensions, as well as the Form and other aspects of the music.

As you tried these exercises, you’ve almost certainly had moments of being surprised, both by your own creativity, and by the huge impact that choosing different Constraints can have on the resulting improvisations. Now it’s time to build on Play-Listen/Listen-Play and Constraints and Dimensions, to provide you with an easy, flexible and fun way to continue practicing Improvisation: Playgrounds.